This Blog

There are 100 million young people in the Middle East and North Africa. They are a force for change in a region at a crossroads. This blog is focused on ideas for tapping into this immense potential and meeting the aspirations for jobs, justice and dignity.

October 2017

Education in Tunisia was one of the pillars of post-independence state, with efforts by Habib Bourguiba and successive governments focused on modernizing the system, and ensuring universal access to education by making it free and compulsory.

Like many other countries around the world, Tunisia knows that the creation of knowledge requires a network of institutions of higher education and scientific research that are capable of engaging minds, exploring the unknown and then disseminating the knowledge that is thus created.

It’s that time of year again. Some weeks ago, more than two million Tunisian primary, junior high, and high school students headed back to school, just as hundreds of millions of children in northern countries.

World Bank Vice President, Hafez Ghanem addresses the key factors influencing the economies of the Middle East and North Africa region, and the steps needed to promote more sustainable growth and unlock the potential of the region’s large youth population.

What are the major factors affecting the economies of the Middle East and North Africa region?

Every year, Iranian schools and universities are in back in session on the first day of autumn—September 23rd. Despite educating some of the world’s top minds, such as the late Maryam Mirzakhani, the only women recipient of the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics, Iran’s educational system has been in crisis. In this short space, I want to focus on the crisis Iran’s higher education system has been facing, which has taken a turn for worse in the past decade.

The Lycée Eucalyptus, a high school in Nice, France, sits close to the airport, surrounded to the west and north by a resolutely working-class neighborhood and by a more middle-class area to the east. The school has a heterogeneous group of students who stay for the most part to themselves. So, for a working relationship to form between Marwan, 12, a Syrian refugee, who has only been in France a few months and speaks little French, and Charlotte, 17, the captain of the girls’ tennis team, is quite remarkable.

This is the second part of our interview with with Safaa El Tayeb El-Kogali, World Bank Practice Manager in the Education Global Practice, on the challenges faced by the region’s education systems and the efforts to address them.

On the heels of the first World Development Report focused entirely on education, and its critical importance for stable and inclusive societies, we launch our annual ‘Back to School’ series that focuses on the state of education in the Middle East and North Africa region. We begin the series with a two-part interview with Safaa El Tayeb El-Kogali, World Bank Practice Manager in the Education Global Practice, on the challenges faced by the region’s education systems and the efforts to address them.